Chinese academics have questioned Japan's sovereignty over Okinawa, an island that has housed numerous US military bases since the second world war and is not usually included in the current territorial disputes between the two Asian countries.

A long piece published earlier this month in the People's Daily – a newspaper controlled by the Chinese Communist party – suggested that China would have reason to assert its rights over the Ryukyu archipelago, of which Okinawa is the main island. According to Zhang Haipeng and Li Guoqiang from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, "the time has come to reconsider unresolved issues concerning the Ryukyu islands".

The two academics went on to examine the 1895 treaty of Shimonoseki, which ended the first Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895, lost by the Manchu Qing dynasty at a time when it was very weak. This "unequal" treaty obliged China to cede a great deal of territory to the "imperialist power", including the island of Formosa, now Taiwan, and was a source of deep and lasting humiliation for the Chinese.

The disputed subtropical archipelago lies between Japan and Taiwan, and in the course of its history was a vassal state of China, paying tribute for years before coming under Japanese sovereignty.

The tiny, but independent and prosperous, kingdom became the Okinawa prefecture in 1879. The Ryukyuans had shared a long history with China and many suffered after the island's annexation, being treated as second-class citizens.

The islands were the theatre of intense combat during the second world war, when large numbers of the Ryukyu population were killed and many others were allegedly forced to take their own lives by the Japanese.

The United States then occupied the islands until 1972, and the Okinawans have had to accept the presence of American military bases to this day.

The calls over Okinawa may well revive tensions between Beijing and Tokyo, already embroiled in a territorial dispute over the Senkaku islands, an archipelago in the South China Sea that China refers to as the Diaoyu islands.

• This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde